So I'm sitting here in my office (I work very late wrapping things up on Friday nights) and I'm thinking:

There are loud and continuous cries that we must quickly try Staff Sergeant Robert Bales who slew the Afghan civilians, and execute him, never mind his having suffered a traumatic brain injury in the service of his country. Yet Major Nidal Hasan, who shot up Fort Hood while screaming 'Allah Akbar!' still has not stood trial, two and a half years after the massacre. And the 'experts' are still debating whether he was insane, even with the clear evidence regarding his 'religious' motive: slay as many infidels as possible.

So we have a soldier in a war zone who cracks, and he must be executed immediately. But a Muslim psychiatrist who was stateside in a nice safe office all day murders 13 and wounds 29 of our own men, and the 'experts' are still arguing that the poor lad suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome, from listening to real soldiers who had actual battle experience. Two and a half years later, still bleeding-heart hand-wringing, and no trial.Is it me, or is something very wrong with this picture?

Not only is the Major still sitting around waiting for a trial ...... the administration has never referred to that massacre as an act of terrorism, even with all the evidence pointing to the fact it was Islamic terrorism.

Definitely shows the double standards employed by certain higher ups.

But, our dear leader feels pressing need to satisfy and roll over for every foreign moslem leader, it seems.

And where do you think these "new people" came from? To make it worse, the rich are moving out if they can, and the ones coming in are poor. Yet the Dems want to keep this happening because it keeps them in power.

Of course, Reagan was blaming Jimmy Carter for launching false attacks during a debate. And that line was so effective, it not only helped Reagan win the debate, but a presidential election that would change American history.

But “there you go again” can apply equally to President Obama. Once again this week, the president was out on the campaign trail bashing and oil and gas companies. And he continued to spread major falsehoods about this industry, which I guess is the polite way to put it.

Obama is obsessed with oil and gas. He is a prisoner of the left-wing environmental groups. And really, he’s extending his leftist class-warfare attack from rich people to successful oil and gas producers.

What seems to have Obama especially steamed is the fact that the conventional-energy companies are profitable. Especially the five largest. So he wants to tax them. He then wants to redistribute their income to his favorite green-energy firms. Sound familiar? I don’t know which is more important to the president — the fact that he hates fossil fuel, or the fact that he hates success. Or that he wants an energy-entitlement state.

But here’s what I do know, factually. Oil companies have an effective corporate tax rate well above 40 percent. And they operate within one of the highest-taxed industries in America. According to the Tax Foundation, for more than 25 years, oil and gas companies have sent more tax dollars to Washington and state capitals than they earned in profits. That’s a fact.

Single-handedly, oil and gas companies finance over 10 percent of non-defense discretionary spending within the U.S. budget. According to the Wall Street Journal, ExxonMobil, the world’s largest energy firm, paid out $59 billion in total U.S. taxes over the five years prior to 2010 while earning only $40.5 billion in domestic profits.

And Obama wants to raise taxes on conventional-energy firms by somewhere between $40 billion and $80 billion? Whatever happened to the supply-side principle that if you tax something more, you get less of it?

But with gasoline prices headed towards $5 a gallon, and with oil prices over $100 a barrel, virtually the whole country outside of the White House wants more oil, more retail gas for the pump, and more energy supplies everywhere in order to bring prices down. Raising taxes won’t do it.

Make no mistake about it: Fossil fuel is going to drive the American economy for decades to come.Green energy is not.

Obama’s other line of attack is that oil companies shouldn’t get any subsidies. They made too much money for that. Well, I’m against oil subsidies. There’s about $90 billion worth in the federal budget. Better to end them, slash corporate tax rates across the board, and let the free market decide energy policy and production.

But on the subject of subsidies, so-called renewable-energy subsidies (think Solyndra) are 49-timesgreater than fossil-fuel subsidies, according to studies by the Congressional Research Service. And the Congressional Budget Office says renewable green energy received 68 percent of energy-related tax preferences in fiscal year 2011, while fossil fuels got only 15 percent. Additionally, oil, natural gas, and coal received 64 cents per megawatt hour in subsidies, while wind power alone received $56.29 per megawatt hour. That’s 100-times what fossil fuels got.

By the way, the so-called subsidies that Obama is talking about are really depreciation write-offs for investment. Oil companies get a 6 percent deduction from income. Most manufacturing industries get 9 percent. And every company in the economy is eligible for faster investment write-offs.

Frankly, the most pro-growth corporate-tax policy would be 100 percent cash-expensing for new investment, a slashed corporate tax rate, and no more subsidies, preferences, and carve-outs. That would be an unbelievable job-creator.

But President Obama is too busy spewing falsehoods to support his ideological agenda than to take account of the facts. And while he’s at it, one of the greatest, pro-growth revolutions ever is taking place right under his nose. It’s the oil and gas shale miracle, which if left unfettered will turn America and Canada into an energy-independent New Middle East inside of ten years.

In fact, the collapse of natural-gas prices brought on by this revolution could become one of the biggest tax cuts for the economy in history, making all our industries vastly more competitive, revolutionizing transportation, and providing more consumer real income at home.

British soldiers leave Southampton aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 for the Falkland Islands, May 12, 1982.

Thirty years ago this Monday, Argentine marines invaded the Falkland Islands, killed or captured its British defenders and declared the islands to be Argentine territory: Les Malvinas. Britain dispatched a naval "task force" to regain them less than a week later. The Falklands War had begun.

According to newly released documents from the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., the U.S. almost took sides against its most important ally, driven by the diplomatic maneuvering of Secretary of State Alexander Haig.

It's already a matter of record that, at first, Washington ostentatiously refused to take sides. Secretary Haig embarked on energetic shuttle diplomacy between Buenos Aires and London to craft a settlement. One month after the landing, the military junta governing Argentina rejected his compromise. The National Security Council met to determine the next stage of U.S. policy.

Among the vast cache of documents just released from the Reagan Library are the minutes of an NSC meeting on April 30, 1982. The release is the result of a 2002 request by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, which will post the minutes on its website on Monday. These records are an as-it-happened chronicle of decision-making in the White House. No part has been redacted, despite significant intelligence content.

The most striking revelation from the meeting is the degree to which Haig's compromise favored the Argentines. The minutes are quite clear on this point: Haig "then described the elements of the American plan which in effect would give ultimate sovereignty to Argentina but under evolutionary conditions which the Islanders could ultimately accept."

It's far from clear, however, that the islanders could or would accept Argentine sovereignty, nor that Haig was really solicitous of their interests. He had recently told U.S. congressmen that the principle of "self-determination" did not really apply to them. And an off-color joke of his about their sexual practices underlined his lack of sympathy.

But Haig was baffled and frustrated by the reaction of the junta: "Our proposals, in fact, are a camouflaged transfer of sovereignty, and the Argentine foreign minister knows this, but the junta will not accept it." This seemingly confirms some Brits' long-standing suspicion that the U.S. was "tilting" toward Buenos Aires throughout the war. But the minutes contradict this in two ways.

First, the NSC was meeting to discuss and, in the event, to decide on a "tilt" toward the British. At this stage the tilt was more symbolic than practical; a White House statement blamed Buenos Aires for the breakdown of negotiations—which, anyway, were to resume shortly with the Peruvian foreign minister offering a rehash of Haig's ideas ("Haig in a poncho" to the Brits).

Second, Haig's main supporter in the meeting was U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, usually his nemesis. More powerful players—Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Central Intelligence Agency chief Bobby Inman—favored a sharper alignment on the British side. But since things were going their way, they said little.

President Reagan presided over this discussion with a kind of calm detachment. He had outlined a fairly clear U.S. position from the start of the crisis: neutrality over which country had sovereignty over the Falklands but strong opposition to settling the question by military aggression. He stuck to it thereafter.

The British would have preferred U.S. support on both points, but what they got was substantial—American endorsement of a principle that allowed Washington to give them strong material support for a military campaign that faced steep uphill odds even then.

Having established this broad principle, Reagan then allowed his cabinet secretaries large leeway in interpreting it. Indeed, Weinberger and Haig left this NSC meeting with its approval of further installments both of military aid and of shuttle diplomacy.

Three weeks later, however, British troops would land at San Carlos Bay. The modest and largely public U.S. "tilt" toward Britain at this meeting became more pronounced in practice as diplomacy faded and the soldiers decided the outcome on the ground. Military aid became Washington's most significant contribution to the war.

Thatcher's combination of judgment and steel nerves stood the test. Twice she accepted compromise proposals along lines that would have ended her career if the junta had accepted them. But she calculated (or gambled) throughout that the junta would never agree to the interim measure of withdrawing its troops from the islands. She proved to be right—and Britain won.

Though only some at the NSC that day wanted a British victory, almost everyone gained from it. The junta fell, free elections were held in 1983 and Argentina embarked on a rare period of political and economic stability that lasted almost two decades. None of the consequences feared at the NSC meeting actually materialized.

Not least among the beneficiaries were Reagan and Thatcher. She achieved dominance over the British political scene that lasted until the month of her dramatic downfall. Reagan had his main overseas partner in the Cold War sustained and strengthened for the long struggle ahead. The wisdom of the tilt to Britain looks obvious only in retrospect—which is why Weinberger and Inman deserve our respect for seeing it at the time.

—Mr. O'Sullivan is the author of "The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Facing a conservative backlash, House Republicans are working to change a new law that allows the indefinite detention without trial of terrorist suspects, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders.

Republicans and Democratic lawmakers said this week that the GOP majority on the House Armed Services Committee was weighing several proposals to revise the provision on indefinite detention that was part of the far-reaching defense bill that Congress passed in December and President Barack Obama signed into law.

Last year, Congress' approach to handling terror suspects divided Republicans and Democrats, pitted the White House against lawmakers and drew fierce opposition from civil liberties groups. The anger still lingers, and GOP leaders are under pressure from a number of rank-and-file members, tea partyers and libertarians to change the law.

"I intend to help put as much political pressure on this issue as possible," said Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., whose staff has spoken to the Armed Services panel. "I intend to spend a lot of time - and I already have been doing so - making the public aware of this issue so we can get the change we need to address it."

Officials for the committee led by Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., had no comment on the possible changes to be included in a defense bill, which could be completed this summer. The discussions are preliminary, but one possibility is greater review for those detained indefinitely, said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the committee's top Democrat.

Conservatives fear that the detention provision could result in unfettered power for the federal government, allowing it to detain American citizens indefinitely for even a one-time contribution to a humanitarian group that's later linked to terrorism. They argue that would be a violation of long-held constitutional rights. Also disconcerting to the GOP is the reality that the current government is led by Democrat Obama.

Several Democrats also have criticized the provision as an example of government overreach and an unnecessary obstacle to the administration's war against terrorism, creating an unusual political coalition in Congress.

In the months since the bill became law, some Republicans who backed the legislation have been challenged at town halls and other meetings with constituents, a turn of events that unnerves the GOP.

"There clearly has been some blowback and that's what the Republicans are trying to address," Smith said.

The indefinite detention provision denies suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subjects them to the possibility they would be held indefinitely. It reaffirms the post-Sept. 11 authorization for the use of military force that allows indefinite detention of enemy combatants. In hopes of quelling the furor, lawmakers added language that said nothing in the law may be "construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."

When Obama signed the bill on Dec. 31, he issued a statement saying he had serious reservations about provisions on the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists. Such signing statements are common and allow presidents to raise constitutional objections to circumvent Congress' intent.

"My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens," Obama said in the signing statement. "Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation."

In February, the Obama administration outlined new rules on when the FBI, rather than the military, could be allowed to retain custody of al-Qaida terrorism suspects who aren't U.S. citizens but are arrested by federal law enforcement officers. The new procedures spelled out seven circumstances in which the president could place a suspect in FBI, rather than military, custody, including a waiver when it could impede counterterrorism cooperation with another government or when it could interfere with efforts to secure an individual's cooperation or confession.

But that's not sufficient for some lawmakers.

Smith and Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., have introduced legislation that would repeal the provision on indefinite detention and reverse the mandatory military custody for foreign terrorist suspects linked to al-Qaida or its affiliates and involved in plotting or attacking the United States.

"I will continue to push that bill," Smith said in an interview. "I know the majority is also putting together some ideas. They're very process-focused. ... I have not seen specifics of that proposal yet and we'll talk to them about it, but obviously I have a much stronger position on that and think that we don't need to have indefinite detention or military custody for the people in the U.S."

Amash is determined to change the law, using town halls in his district and the long reach of Facebook to get his message out. He said many Republicans voted for the defense bill in December after they were promised that legislation fixing the provision would be introduced after Christmas. He's still waiting.

"What I've seen from members of Armed Services Committee is basically an attempt to justify the language as it stands," Amash said. "And considering the extent to which they've dug in their heels on this issue, I'd be surprised if they're actually going to make a real and credible change to the language."

"The DREAM and the NightmareIn California, students are better off being illegal immigrants than legal.30 March 2012

Last year, Governor Jerry Brown signed the California DREAM Act, which makes students in the country illegally eligible for grants and waivers to attend one of the state's public colleges or universities. The students must have attended school in the state for three years, "affirm that they are in the process of applying to legalize their immigration status," and show both financial need and academic achievement. Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, the Los Angeles Democrat who authored the DREAM Act, hails the legislation as a victory for those "in the country through no fault of their own." Opponents such as Republican assemblyman Tim Donnelly—a first-term legislator not given to understatement—called Cedillo's legislation the "California Nightmare Act," said it is "morally wrong," and would create "a new entitlement that is going to cause tens of thousands of people to come here illegally from all over the world."

Poster children for the DREAM Act abound. Mandeep Chahal, for example, was six years old when her parents brought her to the United States from India. Chahal wants to be a doctor; her fellow students at Los Altos High School near Palo Alto voted her the person "Most Likely to Save the World." That's a tall order, but to deny such a person the opportunity seems unreasonable. "Many parents of these children pay taxes for many services they cannot get," argues Cedillo.

Cedillo's point implies that illegal immigrants are the only ones subject to this dynamic. But consider: my taxes subsidize the Medi-Cal system, which provides medical care for low-income state residents, but I couldn't "get" health care that way, even in the year my income was so low that my daughter qualified for a Pell Grant. Likewise, the taxes of, say, a California welder help pay for top-drawer pensions and benefits for state government employees, but he can't enjoy those benefits himself. Neither is he entitled to get a government job merely because his taxes help pay the salaries and benefits of workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles, CalTrans, the California Air Resources Board, the Franchise Tax Board, California's Department of Education, the State Board of Equalization, the Coastal Commission, and on and on.

The taxes of a fast-food worker help subsidize the University of California at Berkeley, but nothing guarantees that taxpayer admission to Berkeley. The state's Master Plan for Higher Education does guarantee everyone a place in the system, whether at a community college, a state university, or within the UC system. But no one is promised a place at the top, and the system grants no special favors to legal immigrants. When I came to the United States, legally, in 1977, I had been studying at the University of Windsor, a four-year school in my hometown of Windsor, Ontario. I wanted to continue my studies at San Diego State University but was not allowed to transfer because I hadn't attended high school in California. SDSU administrators suggested I try the state's community college system, which seemed a step down from what I had in mind. But eventually, I put two children through San Diego State. They're now working in productive careers, a tax burden to no one. No legislation rewards parents for that achievement or for coming to the United States with proper documents.

Cedillo's law, by contrast, rewards those who came to California illegally. Will the law, therefore, encourage more people to enter the state illegally, as Donnelly and other critics assert?

Recall how Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which gave amnesty to several million undocumented immigrants. A quarter of a century later, the number of illegal immigrants stands at 11.5 million. It seems clear that the 1986 act didn't discourage foreign nationals from entering the United States without signing the guest book. One of those who obtained citizenship under the Act was Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, who made his way through UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School and is now associate professor of neurosurgery and oncology at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. Quinones-Hinojosa and others who have spoken out in support of the DREAM Act often give the impression that their cases are typical of illegal aliens. Not exactly. Amnesty measures, however well-intentioned, usually bring unintended consequences.

Consider Ignacio Mesa Viera, subject of a recent front-page story in the Sacramento Bee. He came to the United States illegally in 1979 to work and help his family, as he explained, but was convicted on a drug offense in 1995. He was deported but returned to the United States, whereupon he was busted for another drug offense in 2008. Before his recent deportation, the U.S. government was paying for Viera's kidney dialysis, a treatment that can cost more than $60,000 a year. "I imagine that the reason they don't want to let me stay in this country," Viera told the Bee, "is they don't want to be paying for this."

Cedillo and his colleagues need to know that everybody's taxes pay for services they and their children "cannot get"—including kidney dialysis and other expensive medical treatments courtesy of the federal government. Meantime, as a University of California report noted last year, tens of thousands of middle-class, taxpaying legal residents are being squeezed out of an affordable college education even as the legislature contrives to provide scholarships for the children of illegal aliens. The lawmakers' solution is to create yet another entitlement in the form of a new $1 billion scholarship program for students whose families earn less than $150,000 a year. Such is life in the Golden State, even with a DREAM Act in place.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s and the former editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute."

Tuesday's Supreme Court arguments on the individual mandate were certainly the main event from the constitutional-law perspective. But from the health-policy perspective, Wednesday's arguments over severability were the top draw.

Even with the individual mandate in place, Obamacare is an unstable and unworkable mess. Should the Court strike only the mandate, the practical result would be to merely accelerate Obamacare's inevitable, functional collapse.

Thus, from the perspective of health policy the more interesting question before the Court is that of severability — or, how the Court deals with the rest of Obamacare if it strikes the mandate as unconstitutional.

As Robert Alt and I noted recently, the Court has three options on severability — none of which is attractive from the Justices' perspective:

1) Strike only the mandate, and leave the rest of the statute. That would be the equivalent of pulling the pin before tossing the hand grenade back to Congress.

2) Map the complex interrelationships between the mandate and numerous other provisions, and then try to divine a rationale for discarding (along with the mandate) some provisions, but not others.

3) Conclude that the first option is irresponsible and that the second is impossible, and therefore follow their own stated legal standard to strike the whole law — despite that being an uncomfortable practical position for most judges.

Thus, Wednesday's oral argument on severability was essentially an exercise in the Justices trying to determine which option, from their perspective, was "least ugly."

As the questioning unfolded it seemed that the Justices (including the Court's liberals) grasped that discarding only the mandate and hoping for the best would be irresponsible. At least the more conservative ones also seemed to struggle with how they might find some number of other provisions to be non-severable (including even the few offered by the government) without severability devolving into an illogical and impossible exercise.

Indeed, in the questioning it became apparent that even adopting the government's limited position of striking only a few provisions as "non-severable" from the mandate was internally inconsistent and no more logical than any other potential rationale for partial severability — points that Robert and I made in our paper. That conclusion also seemed to be reinforced (albeit, unintentionally) in the questioning of the Court-Appointed Amicus Curiae tasked with advocating for striking only the mandate — which was the decision of the Eleventh Circuit, but a position that neither the plaintiffs nor the government supported.

My overall impression was that the Justices appeared to be gravitating, reluctantly but inexorably, toward the solution that they were initially least inclined to embrace — that of striking down the whole law.

Given that context, what particularly intrigued me was that the plaintiffs' attorney, Paul Clement, was clearly "swinging for the fences" on severability. Prior to oral arguments, there was an assumption, even among conservatives, that the plaintiffs' argument for striking the whole law was a kind of "ask for the whole loaf to increase your chances of getting half a loaf" strategy. But Clement's references to Buckley v. Valeo — not once, but three times, including making it the final point in his rebuttal argument — showed that he really was going for the home run.

Put in unvarnished terms, Clement was essentially saying to the Justices: "In Buckley v. Valeo, the Court struck some provisions but left standing others (including some constitutionally dubious ones), out of deference to Congress. Look at what that got you. Forty years of an unworkable statute and yet more constitutional challenges to it brought before you. The latest of those, Citizens United v. FEC, resulted in an unprecedented (and both institutionally and personally insulting) attack on you, to your face, by the president in his State of the Union Speech. That is the thanks you got for trying to be deferential to the political branches while legitimately exercising your duty to defend the First Amendment. Do yourselves, and everybody else, a big favor by not repeating that mistake in this case. Strike the whole law, and send the Congress and the president a message that they should think carefully about the Constitution before legislating. Sure, some of them are going to scream. But if you strike the whole thing, they only get to scream once."

Of course, Clement didn't need to spell it out quite so crassly. He knew that the Justices would read those unspoken inferences into his concluding statement — which, by the way, was also the last word in the entire argument over severability:

And that takes me to my last point, which is simply this court in Buckley created a halfway house and it took Congress 40 years to try to deal with the situation, when contrary to any time of their intent, they had to try to figure out what are we going to do when we are stuck with this ban on contributions, but we can't get at expenditures because the Court told us we couldn't? And for 40 years they worked in that halfway house. Why make them do that in health care? The choice is to give Congress the task of fixing this statute, the residuum of this statute after some of it is struck down, or giving them the task of simply fixing the problem on a clean slate. I don't think that is a close choice. If the individual mandate is unconstitutional, the rest of the Act should fall.

I came away from the severability arguments thinking, for the first time, that the Court might actually strike down the entire law.

Of course that would be an excellent outcome for both the Constitution and the health system, but it would still not be the end of the matter. The Left would immediately begin bleating about the loss of Obamcare's supposed "benefits" and attack the right for not having solutions to health-care problems.

We on the right must be prepared to vigorously counter both lines of attack. Conservative health-policy experts at Heritage and elsewhere are already fact-checking the Left's claimed "benefits" of Obamacare. Conservatives have also long advocated an alternative vision of a patient-driven, market-based health system, most recently summarized in Heritage's Saving the American Dream proposal. While awaiting the Supreme Court's decision, my colleagues and I will continue to advance in detail the benefits of conservative health reforms while also continuing to critique the flaws and failings of Obamacare.

— Ed Haislmaier is senior research fellow in health-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation."